Future Exhibitions and Installations

The Getty Center

Light, Paper, Process: Reinventing Photography

April 14–September 6, 2015

At a time when digital technologies offer increasingly sophisticated options for producing, storing, and disseminating images, a number of artists have turned their attention to exploring the essence of photography, distilling it to its basic components of light-sensitive emulsions and chemical development. These artists may use hand-coated or expired papers, archival negatives, or custom-built cameras, or they may eschew the use of a camera or film altogether. All revel in materials and process, employing darkroom techniques that shift our understanding of photography away from a medium that merely records the world.

In Focus: Animalia

May 26–October 18, 2015

Photographs of animals have circulated since the early history of the medium, initially focusing on those that were tame, captive, or dead. Advancements in camera and film technologies enabled precise recordings of beasts in motion and, eventually, in their natural habitats. Spanning the history of photography, this exhibition examines the expanding
tradition of animal representation through the works of artists such as Adolphe Braun, Lisette Model, Horatio Ross, Taryn Simon, Sandy Skoglund, and Alfred Stieglitz, among others.

A Kingdom of Images: French Prints in the Age of Louis XIV, 1660–1715

June 16–September 6, 2015

From grand royal portraits to satiric views of everyday life, and from small-scale fashion prints decorated with actual fabrics to monumental panoramas of Versailles and the Louvre, this exhibition explores the rich variety of prints that came to define French power and prestige in the era of Louis XIV (1638–1715). During the Sun King's long reign, printmakers and publishers effectively deployed prints to promote French culture, art, and style. Commemorating the 300th anniversary of Louis XIV's death, A Kingdom of Images: French Prints in the Age of Louis XIV, 1660–1715 features nearly 100 works from the Getty Research Institute and the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Andrea del Sarto: The Renaissance Workshop in Action

June 23–September 13, 2015

This major loan exhibition celebrates the transformation of the art of drawing by Andrea del Sarto (1486–1530), one of the greatest Florentine Renaissance artists. Moving beyond the graceful harmony and elegance of his elders and peers, such as Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Fra Bartolommeo, Sarto brought unprecedented realism and immediacy to his art through the rough and rustic use of red chalk and the creation of powerful life and compositional studies. Comprising rare drawings and panel paintings from key international collections, the exhibition fully illuminates Andrea del Sarto's inventiveness, creative process, and workshop practice.

The exhibition was co-organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Frick Collection, New York.

Touching the Past: The Hand and the Medieval Book

July 7–September 27, 2015

Precious historical artifacts, manuscripts preserve some of the finest examples of medieval art. Seen in libraries and museums behind glass, these books have been largely removed from the realm of touch, making it easy to forget that their lavishly illuminated pages were once turned, stroked, stitched, and sometimes even sliced by generations before us. Drawn primarily from the permanent collection, Touching the Past: The Hand and the Medieval Book explores manuscripts as tangible, tactile objects that invited touch and were handled—reverently, carelessly, obsessively, and critically—by medieval audiences.

Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World

July 28–November 1, 2015

During the three centuries between the reigns of Alexander the Great and Augustus, artists around the Mediterranean created innovative, realistic sculptures of physical power and emotional intensity. Bronze—with its tensile strength, reflective effects, and ability to hold the finest detail—was employed for dynamic compositions, dazzling displays of the nude body, and graphic expressions of age and character. This unprecedented international loan exhibition unites about fifty significant bronzes of the Hellenistic age.

This exhibition was organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington with the participation of the Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici della Toscana. It is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

The Younger Generation: Contemporary Japanese Photography

October 6, 2015–February 21, 2016

Several young Japanese photographers garnered attention in the 1990s, when their bold, colorful, often provocative pictures of themselves and their immediate worlds were collectively dubbed "girl photographs." This exhibition celebrates the emergence of five talented female photographers from Japan whose careers began in the 1990s and 2000s—Kawauchi Rinko, Onodera Yuki, Otsuka Chino, Sawada Tomoko, and Shiga Lieko. Selected series by these artists evoke the influence of Ishiuchi Miyako, whose work is showcased in the companion exhibition Ishiuchi Miyako: Postwar Shadows.

Art of the Fold: Drawings of Drapery and Costume

October 6, 2015–January 10, 2016

This exhibition of drawings from the permanent collection explores how artists regularly employed drapery studies as part of the representation of the human figure. The expressive potential of drapery was often harnessed to convey a mood, such as religious fervor, surprise, or anger. The exhibition also addresses how various representations of costume indicate or mask status in the social hierarchy.

Ishiuchi Miyako: Postwar Shadows

October 6, 2015–February 21, 2016

Self-taught photographer Ishiuchi Miyako (Japanese, born 1947) stunned the Japanese photography establishment in the late 1970s with grainy, haunting, black-and-white images of Yokosuka— the city where Ishiuchi spent her childhood and where the United States established an important naval base in 1945. Fusing the personal and political in her work, Ishiuchi interweaves her identity with the complex history of postwar Japan that emerged from "shadows" cast by American occupation. Presenting photographs made over the last forty years, this exhibition includes Ishiuchi's most recent series, ひろしま/hiroshima, seventy years after the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Edible Monument: The Art of Food for Festivals

October 13, 2015–March 13, 2016

Elaborate artworks made of food were created for royal court and civic celebrations in early modern Europe. Like today's Rose Bowl Parade on New Year's Day or Mardi Gras just before Lent, festivals were times for exuberant parties. Public celebrations and street parades featured large-scale edible monuments made of breads, cheeses, and meats. At court festivals, banquet settings and dessert buffets featured magnificent table monuments with heraldic and emblematic themes made of sugar, flowers, and fruit. This exhibition, drawn from the Getty Research Institute's Festival Collection, features rare books and prints, including early cookbooks and serving manuals that illustrate the methods and materials for making edible monuments.

Eat, Drink, and Be Merry: Food in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

October 13, 2015–January 3, 2016

The cultivation, preparation, and consumption of food formed a framework for daily labor and leisure in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Illuminated manuscripts offer images of the chores that produced sustenance, cooking techniques, popular dishes, grand feasts, and diners of different social classes. Food had powerful symbolic meaning in Christian devotional practice as well as in biblical stories and saintly miracles, where it nourished both the body and the soul.

In Focus: Daguerreotypes

November 3, 2015–March 20, 2016

A "mirror with a memory," a daguerreotype is a direct-positive photographic image fixed on a silver-coated metal plate. The earliest form of photography, this revolutionary invention was announced to the public in 1839. In our present image-saturated age, it is difficult to imagine a time before the ability to record the world with the blink of an eye or the touch of a fingertip. This exhibition, drawn from the Getty Museum’s permanent collection alongside loans from two private collections, presents unique reflections of people, places, and events during the first two decades of the medium.

Traversing the Globe through Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts

January 26–June 26, 2016

Embark on a kaleidoscopic journey through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to consider how illuminated manuscripts and other portable objects—like ceramics, textiles, glassworks, gems, and sculptures—contributed to one's outlook on the world in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the early Americas. Drawn primarily from the Getty’s collection of illuminated manuscripts, with complementary loans from collections across Los Angeles, the exhibition presents stunning and at times surprising images and a range of ideas about exploration, exotic pursuits, and cross-cultural exchanges in the then-known world.

Noir: The Romance of Black in 19th-Century French Drawings and Prints

February 9–May 15, 2016

Beginning around 1840, French artists began depicting shadowy, often nocturnal or twilight scenes in which forms emerge and sink back into darkness. This quest for darkened realms accompanied an exploration of new forms of subject matter, such as dream states and nonidealized representations of the poor and working class, and new black drawing materials, such as man-made charcoal, black chalk, and conté crayon. Using drawings and prints from the Getty's permanent collection and loans from private and public Los Angeles collections, this exhibition examines how artists such as Rodolphe Bresdin, Maxime Lalanne, Odilon Redon, and Georges Seurat championed these new, dark subjects.

The Thrill of the Chase: The Wagstaff Collection of Photographs

March 15–July 31, 2016

In 1973, with the assistance of his lover Robert Mapplethorpe, Samuel J. Wagstaff Jr. (American, 1921–1987) came to realize that photography was an underappreciated and undervalued art form. Over the next decade, Wagstaff assembled one of the most important private collections of photographs in the world. In 1984 he sold it to the J. Paul Getty Museum, where it became part of a group of major acquisitions that formed the Department of Photographs. This three-gallery exhibition presents a selection of Wagstaff’s collection, encompassing both masterpieces of the medium and obscure works that deserve attention.

In Focus: Electric!

April 5–August 28, 2016

Electrical innovations have radically transformed the rhythm of our days and our experience of darkness. Photographers have been attentive to such changes, capturing both excitement and concern about the electrical forces that energize our lives. Drawn from the Getty Museum’s permanent collection, this exhibition highlights historic photographs that showcase the allure of artificial illumination as well as recent photographs that express unease about life tethered to the power grid.

Unruly Nature: The Landscapes of Théodore Rousseau

June 21–September 11, 2016

Though his reputation was eclipsed in the early twentieth century with the triumph of Impressionism, Théodore Rousseau (1812–1867) was one of the giants of French landscape in the second half of the nineteenth century, and his work was avidly collected for staggering sums across Europe and North America. Bringing together about seventy-five paintings and drawings, this international loan exhibition explores the astonishing technical and stylistic variety of his work, revealing him to be one of the most exciting, experimental, and affecting artists of his day.

The Getty Villa

Greece’s Enchanting Landscape: Watercolors by Dodwell and Pomardi

October 21, 2015–February 15, 2016

“Almost every rock, every promontory, every river, is haunted by the shadows of the mighty dead,” wrote the English antiquarian Edward Dodwell of his travels in Greece in the early nineteenth century. During this time, he and the Italian artist Simone Pomardi produced almost one thousand illustrations. Selected from a vast archive of their watercolors and drawings in the collection of the Packard Humanities Institute, this exhibition brings to life a vanished world that enchanted European travelers and inspired their passionate pursuit of classical antiquity. The exhibition culminates with a series of monumental panoramas of Athens rendered with exceptional detail.

Roman Mosaics across the Empire

March 30–September 12, 2016

Ancient Roman decor was unique for the elaborate mosaic pavements that transformed entire rooms into spectacular settings of saturated color, mythological imagery, and pure imagination. Geometric patterns and narrative scenes enlivened interior spaces and mirrored the cultural ambitions of wealthy patrons. This exhibition of mosaics from the Getty Museum's permanent collection presents the artistry of mosaics and the contexts of their discovery across Rome's expanding empire from southern Italy to Gaul, North Africa, and Syria.